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Envirofone brand manager Fay Shannon said 100 million, as ridiculous as it sounded, was probably about right.
She said an estimated 20 million handsets would be upgraded in the UK this year and with people upgrading every 18 months or so for the last seven or eight years, this meant there were millions of older phones hanging about, but also iPhones or Androids that are barely 18 months old.
“Some of these are being used as hand me ups, hand me downs or the worst case scenario keeping them for a spare i.e. a phone that never ever gets used again.”
Ms Shannon said Envirofone received thousands of phones a day and 98% of these were reused.
“They are sent out to be refurbished and then reused in developing countries where the networks don’t subsidise the handsets so the cost of a new mobile phone to most people is unaffordable. And even if a phone is completely valueless, we work with UK registered recycling plants to make sure they do not end up in a landfill.”
Ms Shannon said to get the best deal, people needed to sell their phone as they upgraded, since phones depreciated by a couple of pounds a month.
“When you think of all the unused phones in the UK ¦you’re looking at a potential loss across the UK of about £3 billion per year.”
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Phone insurance website www.mobileinsurance.co.uk, has posited that there could be more than 100 million unused mobile phones in households around the United Kingdom.
That’s right. Posited.
The website polled 2,391 phone owners or users aged 18 or over as part of ongoing research into mobile phone usage and the average answer given when asked approximately how many unused handsets they had in their household was four. Just under three quarters, or 71% of respondents said the majority of their unused phones worked.
MobileInsurance.co.uk extrapolated (you heard me) that with 26.4 million households in the United Kingdom currently, according to the Office of National Statistics, this would be equate to 105,600,000 unused mobile phones in houses in the UK, mostly in working order.
When asked how often they tended to change their mobile phones, 76% of respondents said it was once every two years, and the most common reasons for changing handsets were contracts renewing or ending, at 52% of respondents, a broken phone with 26%, boredom with 13% and keeping up with the latest handsets at 6% with 3% answering ‘other’.
MobileInsurance managing director John Lamerton said he was surprised to see how many old phones were kept in houses around the UK and said having working mobile phones hiding in drawers did no one any good.
“You should think about selling your old handset to make some money for it. People only tend to insure the phone they’re currently using, so if anything happens to old handsets that are kept around the house, nothing can be done.”
In March, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said that by 2020 the UK would dispose of 12 million tonnes of electronic equipment, a quarter of which would be IT equipment, consumer electronics and display devices.
“Almost a quarter of all used or broken electrical and electronic products taken to household recycling centres could easily be fixed and resold, which represents a gross revenue opportunity of £200 million each year.”
So maybe it’s time to get your handy dandy tool kit out and start repairing some revenue, readers. Alliteration aside, if you’re anything like the respondents to the survey above, you may have four possible money makers mouldering in your m-drawers somewhere at home.